Origins: Lucilius

Near the beginning of the tenth book of his Institutes, midway through a list of readings recommended for the orator in training, Quintilian, Rome’s most prolific theorist of rhetoric after Cicero, takes a tendentious step towards satire’s terrain by claiming that this particular genre can be accounted “totally ours.” The claim is tendentious because extreme, and true only in a highly qualified sense. For ancient critics had long since sought to establish the genre’s Greek pedigree by tracing its development past its most obvious early practitioners in Republican Rome (Ennius and Lucilius, both of whom wrote in the second century bce) all the way to fifth-century Athens. Claims of satire’s Greek provenience, although they could easily be stretched to an opposite extreme, are defensible and seem to have at least some narrow basis in fact.

Horace, writing more than one hundred years before Quintilian, was aware of both extremes. Perhaps to goad those in his audience who adamantly defended the idea that satire sprouted entirely from Roman soil, but perhaps also to mimic those who wanted to believe that any good thing in Roman literature just had to come from the Greeks, Horace went so far as to assert that Lucilius did not a whit more to invent satire than to rework the meters of Greek Old Comedy (“having changed only their meters and rhythms,” mutatis tantum pedibus numerisque, Sermones 1.4.7).

It is a commonplace to say that satire is the most difficult genre to define, and always has been. “Metamorphic” and “Protean” are terms commonly applied to it, the latter perhaps suggesting that it not only has no stable form but will also continue to elude attempts to tie it down. The task of exploring what constitutes the “presence” of Roman satire in the present and recent past is thus a rather delicate one, for how can we recognize it to be “there” if we are not sure what we are looking for? If one looks hard enough, one can find James Joyce referring to Ulysses as “farraginous.” The satiric associations of this term (nostri farrago libelli, Juvenal 1.86) will certainly not have been lost on Joyce, but most readers could be forgiven for failing to spot the writer of Latin hexameter verse in this novel shape. Formal verse satire is still practiced, but not in a way that seems central to the oeuvre of any major author or to cultural practice more generally, as it could be argued it was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although Martin Winkler in his anthology Juvenal in English detects some significant echoes in T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden, twentieth-century engagement with Horace and Juvenal has largely come in the form of translations, but nothing has emerged that could begin to match the response of Dryden and Johnson to Juvenal. Instances of the invocation of Roman satirical texts as clear as Fellini’s Satyricon are very few and far between.

What makes for a good companion? What makes for a good companion to satire? The present volume offers a variety of versions of companionship, of course. I expect to be a sort of short-term companion, a companion met briefly and fortuitously, a companion who whispers a dirty little secret in your ear and then walks off leaving you to decide what to do with this information. The image is not, of course, casually chosen, for I am here to talk about the production, reproduction, and public dissemination in and by satire of a dangerous dirty little Roman secret. Better still, there is a crisis: bad sex has gone public. Satire upbraids. But I want to talk about the desire to talk about desire, and the perverted pleasures of reproaching perverts.

I plan to neglect the question of the persona of the narrator of the satire. There are a variety of accounts of this character. But I do hope that an investigation of the structure of the satirical narrative of desire will be complete in and of itself. And I hope as well that readers will themselves take these conclusions and apply them to the broader question of the “masks of satire.” I am not after a biography such as Highet (1954). Nor do I even offer a reading that aims for the man behind the mask as frequently found in Winkler (1983). Furthermore, I am not even looking to decide whether or not the satirist “is serious” or if he “means what he says” even though an essay like Gold (1994) makes it clear that it is hard to claim that Juvenal offers a mere parody of moralism that self-destructs amidst its own vitriol.

Histories of English literature tell us that the defining terms of Restoration (1660) poetry were established by John Dryden (1631-1700). Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), in his not entirely uncritical Life, makes Dryden’s transformation of English poetry analogous to Augustus' Rome: “he found it brick, and he left it marble.” He is the seminal poet of his age. So too the masterworks of Restoration satire are Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe and Absalom and Achitophel, and his later Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire set out the ways in which the Roman satirists were to be read and adapted right through the eighteenth century. Pope’s (1688-1744) and Johnson’s conceptions of Horace and Juvenal derive directly from a typology that Dryden popularizes, if not invents. This should, then, be an essay on Dryden. But it is not; for the brilliance of Dryden’s work has tended to leave us a distorted picture of what satire, or indeed Horace and Juvenal, might have meant to a Restoration reader; we look back at the Restoration and see Dryden; a contemporary reader of satire would have seen Dryden and others experimenting with classical satire’s legacy, sorting out its manners and place in the hotly contested literary and social politics of the Restoration. That said, I cannot offer a significantly less inflected version of Restoration satire here; merely another view from its slightly seamier underside, and here too Dryden plays a role …

Readers of this chapter may be surprised by its Greek content. Verse satire is certainly a Roman genre, but Menippean satire (as a generic term no older than the Renaissance) is a Greco-Roman phenomenon. Its founder and patron saint is the Greek Menippus, a Cynic of the third century bce; the Roman Varro names his literary experiments Saturae Menippeae after his Greek muse. But if we are to understand Menippus at all, we need to speak of Lucian, the prolific Greek belletrist of the second century ce. This Lucian is both a student of Greek literature and an observer of the Roman scene; the fourth century Roman emperor Julian, who writes in Greek and who is influenced in one of his satiric productions both by the Roman Seneca and by the Greek Lucian, helps to illumine both Seneca and the traditions of Menippean satire in late antiquity. These Greeks have a crucial place in this Roman book, for without them the history of Roman satire, both in late antiquity and in the Renaissance, cannot be written.

To extricate a history of the genre of Menippean satire in the classical period from our intractable welter of testimonia, fragments, and imperfectly preserved literary experiments – Varro’s Menippeans, Petronius’ Satyricon, and Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis are all to varying degrees incomplete – is to acknowledge that our data, as frustrating as they are, have also overwhelmed the texts that gave them birth. The little that we can know about Menippus the author, combined with the literary uses to which Lucian puts Menippus, as character as well as author, leads me to the following conclusion: that Menippean satire is a useful name for the epicenter of a range of phenomena, both stylistic and thematic, that in fact evolve over time.

Literary understanding is often a matter of creating spaces. You read a poem and align it with another, and think about the aspects of each which are not there in the other. Literary genres often work in a similar way: they develop as writers work out and give shape to the space between themselves and their predecessors. This space might be chronological, geographical, temperamental, cultural, or linguistic; it might be narrowed by personal affinities, admiration, and cultural allegiance, or widened by differences in the forms of social relations experienced by each writer. But it is always there, even in those rare literary relationships when a writer seems to be consciously attempting to catch the flavor of a predecessor exactly. And it is by feeling what is not there in one poem or poet that you come to know what is there in another. The habitual mannerisms or recurrent points of unease of one writer are much more obvious when you read the work of another person who does not have them. This is why comparative literature matters, and this is why this volume not only contains but needs to contain chapters on the afterlife of Roman satire. Gaining a full understanding of Roman satire entails also understanding what it is not like, or not quite like, and imagining how it would look if some of its central concerns were altered or nudged slightly off center.

Does a Companion suit Roman Satire?

Is a Companion what Roman Satire needs?

It is easy to see a point in building a team to accompany study of the topic. Satire doesn't immediately strike us as a conformist or consensual arena, and so it’s bound to be a good idea to have a line-up of experts all wanting to be our special friend and bag the attention. They are unlikely to prod us for where we are coming from; or to insist on laying out their own individual(ist) wares - exposing hopes and fears/proposing apparatus and theories. That is not how this contemporary genre of critical commentary works. Not everything, perhaps, in the present collection rides comfortably in the same carriage. But there is precious little friction between the contributions on view, and if you half-anticipated that the plainstyle writing of the textbook marketplace might meet the subject matter halfway with a dash of malice, a pound of scurrility, and a sprinkle of innuendo, you'll have to admit that you skipped or nodded - or else it passed you by.

Juvenal is the satirist of comparatives and superlatives. In exploiting hexameter satire’s partnership with epic, he sets out to look bigger, denser, ruder, slyer, angrier, fleshier, more sophisticated and bilious, to the power of ten, than all the other satirists before him put together. Next to this heavyweight, Horace’s bitter-sweet social commentary, or Persius' harsh medicinal concentrate, should begin to taste like very thin soup. Juvenal rejects outright Callimachean principles of slenderness, compression, and refinement, claiming instead to be driving his chariot “down the track which great Lucilius blazed” (1.19-20). Horace’s irony lite, or Persius' short sharp shock therapy, is to be replaced by behemoth-scale onslaughts inspired by the bellicose Republican freedom fighter. Whereas Horace buries Lucilian rage beneath manicured lawns, Juvenal digs up a century of pent up angst, yet only to hurl it at corpses who cannot answer back. This is war, and there is no escape, either for his victims or readers (and we may well suspect that they are one and the same in his book). The dysfunctional morass of contemporary Rome incites antirationalistic gibe, not spiritual inner journeys or jocular reflection among friends. “Today every vice has reached its zenith,” he announces in his opening poem (149); “doesn’t it make you want to cram wax tablets with invective right there on the street corner?” (63–4).

Roman satire describes itself as play more often than it describes itself as satire. Its playfulness consists in part of its relationship to other, ostensibly more serious, literary genres (e.g. epic, oratory, history). But in several instances Roman authors link satire with play of a non-literary sort. Thus we may regard the ancient representation of satire as play as an invitation to consider satire as a social practice as well as a literary genre. Satire, like all ancient literary genres, belongs to the history of practices as well as to the history of texts: this would be clear even without references to play. But play - its meaning, variants, and social functions - provides us with a useful means of situating satire among the practices that can be reconstructed from the largely textual remains of ancient Roman culture. Such an endeavor is valuable both as an interpretation of textual references to play (i.e. as an aspect of the so-called “literary” study of satire) and as part of the related enterprise of cultural history, which requires consideration of embodied practices, as well as of more readily accessible texts.

Horace’s two books of Satires have always lurked in the shadow of the Odes. Aside from such favourite anecdotes as the much-translated encounter with a literary gatecrasher on the Via Sacra, or the “granny’s tale” of the town mouse and the country mouse, they have for the most part been found strange, profoundly unsatisfying poems, whose self-deprecating tone has condemned them to neglect. They are also, by most standards, astonishingly unsatirical. The first book, published in 36/5 bce, is Horace’s poetic debut, an “integrational” book in which a freedman’s son marks his miraculous arrival in society (after being proscribed and fighting on the wrong side at Philippi), and justifies his envied niche as a civil servant (scriba quaestorius) and poet in the “pure house”of the millionaire Maecenas. The second, published in 30 bce after the battle of Actium, is tense with all the increasing restrictions of the new regime; Horace virtually gives up the right to speak, and directs his satire mostly against himself.

The satiric gaze: the physician, the body, and the mirror

Roman satirists are experts at reading the body’s signs. The satirist’s eye, like that of a physician or an expert in physiognomy, is keen at detecting indications of sickness or health, virtue or vice. That the satirist is able to “read past” the body for the condition of the soul is an idea solidly attested already in Lucilius at fr. 678W: “we see that one who is mentally ill gives an indication of this through his body.”

The principal object of the satirist’s gaze is the world of contemporary social experiences: he catalogues his society’s distortions, sometimes aggressively, sometimes with an ironic smile, but always respecting the body’s symbolic potentials as an index of moral values and internal states. This cognitive tension, by analogy, intrudes upon language by literalizing images or metaphors and reducing abstract concepts to their real or corporeal referents, thereby extracting from them a moral significance.

Among the many intriguing aspects of Roman verse satire is the fact that it was such an early creation. Only a generation before, Latin literature had begun with the deliberate translation and adaptation not just of Greek genres, but of individual works, such as Homer’s Odyssey. Paradoxically to modern perceptions, throughout the history of Latin literature acknowledgment of Greek predecessors was to remain a sign of high poetic ambition. Roman satire, on the other hand, although not totally without precedent in Greek literature, was destined to be the only kind of Latin poetry which had a Latin name and did not openly claim a Greek model.

Owing to the loss of most early Roman literature we simply do not have enough surviving evidence to trace the formation of Roman satire with exactness. To modern literary historians Quintus Ennius (239–169 bce) represents the first phase in the development of the genre. For the Romans, however, it was created anew by Gaius Lucilius (floruit 130–103 bce). It was the latter, not Ennius, who became the generic exemplar for Roman verse satire (Horace, Sermones 1.10.46–9, 64–7; Quintilian, Institutes 10.1.95 does not mention Ennius). In fact, it was perhaps not clear until after Lucilius had made satura a vehicle of mockery and invective that a new genre had been created.

One of the things Lucilius, Horace, Persius, and Juvenal have in common is their pleasure in a nice bit of epic furniture about the place. It is easy enough to install, since epic and satire both use the dactylic hexameter. It is fun to hear Horace describe the city mouse and the country mouse going to Rome in the kind of night that falls in Roman epic (Horace, Sermones 2.6.98-101). It is amusing to see a decadent Roman aristocrat as a “boy Automedon” (Achilles' charioteer, Juvenal 1.61), or to see the admirable Pyrrha, who helps repopulate the earth after the flood by throwing stones over her shoulder, through Juvenal’s jaundiced eyes, looking like a procuress setting out her girls (Juvenal 1.84). And of course everyone enjoys a nice swipe at bad epic poets now and then. But the function of epic allusion in Roman satire should not be understood as exclusively decorative. In many genres, poets use allusions to define their poetic projects and to articulate important themes. It is well understood that the Roman satirists use allusions to or descriptions of their satiric predecessors to articulate their poetic projects. What has been less appreciated is how precisely each poet chooses his allusions to epic to define his poetic project and its political dimension.